Ranging in form from elegy to satire to metaphysics to blues, Christopher Doda's latest book, Aesthetics Lesson, is an exciting meditation on art and power. His poems investigate the Ôunnamed cities of light' created by the artist, reflecting and dissecting how the creative impulse can lead to both solace and destruction. Centred around the title piece, a crown of self-generating glosas that examine the role of the artist in our mechanized and digitized society, Aesthetics Lesson offers a potent landscape not easily forgotten. Love and anger, rage and compassion burst and oscillate as Doda looks to the past and future to document Ôhalf-lives trembling on the lip of time.' Doda's gift is to challenge notions of progress and change and to take an unflinching look at the curious and dangerous metamorphosis of the human spirit.

Christopher Doda is a poet and an award winning critic living in Toronto. His first book of poems, Among Ruins (2001), was released by Mansfield Press; he is an editor at Exile: The Literary Quarterly.

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The wonderful ideas that are in this book about passion and art will swim around in your brain poking at old beliefs and testing core ideas about cherished places, how they work and how they can be catalysts for renewing your neighborhood or even your entire city. GET and READ!Ó (Fred Kent, Principal, Project for Public Spaces, New York)